Moving your WordPress to a different folder

When WordPress is installed, it will only work correctly within the folder that the program was installed in. In order to move WordPress to a different folder within your account, a few modifications to the coding is required. For example, you may need to do this if originally you installed WordPress on yourdomain.com, but later decide that you want the WordPress site in yourdomain.com/blog.

How do I move my WordPress site to a different folder?

Moving your WordPress website to a new folder is easy! There are different methods to complete this task, however this is the way that we recommend:

Now we will copy all the files. (Not Cut. Until the site is working in the new folder we do not want to remove it from the old folder). To copy the files, click the Select all button at the top of the page. Once all the files and folders are selected, click on Copy in the File Manager menu bar.

A new window appears where you will instruct File Manger where to copy your files to. In the filed provided, type in the new folder that you want your WordPress website moved to and click Copy File(s). This may take a minute or two, depending on the size of your website, so do not be alarmed if nothing appears to happen for several minutes.

Once it is done, navigate to the folder that you moved your WordPress website to and confirm that the files were copied.

Scroll down to the file called wp-config.php, right click on the file and select Code Edit.

Now that you have opened the wp-config file, you will just need to add two lines of code to let the WordPress software know the new location of the website. In your wp-config file you will see coding that looks similar to this:

Make sure that you keep the formatting exactly the same, and replace example.com/newlocation with the folder that you moved your WordPress website too.

Once you have added the two lines of code, click the Save Changes button at the top of the page.

You can navigate to the new location in your web browser and make sure that it worked. If it does not appear, then make sure that the added code is correct as the exact syntax and capitalization must be used for it to work properly.

Once you have thoroughly tested your site and verified that all files and folders were moved correctly, you can then delete the files and folders in the original folder where WordPress was installed (where you copied from in Step 3 above).

Congratulations, now you know how to Move your WordPress site to a different folder!

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Comments

I think I;m almost there. I copied the content of the Public-html/wordpress folder to the public-html folder and edited the but when I edited the /home/pikeli5/public_html/wp-config.php file as directed to add define('WP_HOME','http://pikelions.org/public-html');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://pikelions.pikelions.org/public-html');
. Now I get the original word-press seti I initially tried to setup instead of the Premium Site Builder one (a good thing) but all of the pages that were in the public-html/wordpress directory don't show up and I can't login to word-press any more:-(

Thanks for the question. If your Wordpress files are already in the folder for the subdomain, then you don't need to move them. The main thing you'll need to worry about is the URL. You will need to update the URL as per the article above. This would be in addition to creating the subdomain entry in the cPanel.

I hope this helps to clarify the issue! Please let us know if you have any further questions or comments.

Sorry if this question sounds unncessary, but do you mean to say if for example a post has two embeded external links in it https://abc.com/123/xyz/sample and an image link http://xyz.pqr.com/123/sample and the post has been shared on social medias and also sent through email / newletters. Will all those who click on those links be able to land on the right destination if the website folder is changed as per the above process? In other words, will not those links look for those particular directories mentioned in the links and return error 404? Or is this all taken care of by the database?

The article title is mis-leading. I have it on the list of articles that will be re-written to be clearer about the actual process of moving WordPress into a different folder. The process above actually allows you to set it so that WordPress LOOKS to a different location for the WordPress files. This is very often the case when people install WordPress into something like http://wordpress_site.com/blog and then want their URL to be only http://wordpress_site.com . If you want to have the actual WordPress documentation on moving a WordPress site, please see Moving WorddPress. This is directly from the WordPress Codex. Apologies for the confusion!